Abstract
In this thesis, we present a core-centric design paradigm for System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs. We present a design methodology and flow that is able to convert design specifications into chip layouts by automatically reused existing cores. Case studies targeted to speech recognition applications have been conducted to demonstrate the viability of the proposed core-centric design paradigm. The results show that the proposed core-centric design paradigm can significantly shorten the chip development time by reusing silicon-proof soft cores.